I visit a local chain-store cd store quite frequently. I’ve been building up my database of 90’s cds (a lot of which I owned before, but got scratched to hell.)
Anyways, I pretty much vow to myself that I will only buy a cd if it’s used. Why buy a fresh cd for $19.99 when I could buy the 100% guaranteed used cd for $7.99. This might sound harsh, but I’ve found great used cd’s lately, and I think it’s because the crappy economy is forcing some people to part with their old cd’s.
Back to the main question… does buying a used cd at a record store return any money to the artist, or is the chain just pocketing the $6 from paying $2/cd to reselling at $8?
That’s actually one of the behaviors that the music and publishing industries are trying to stop, because secondhand items don’t give royalties. The chain is just pocketing money. It’s also one of the big reasons for the invasive DRM on software.
As far as I am aware it all runs under the first sale doctrine. One the original owner sells a CD to another party they relenquish all rights to that copy. If the new owner decides to sell it the original owner can’t claim any royalties.
Why in hells name should they. One well knomw artist in the UK a friend of Tony Blair and co wants the royalties laws changed in the UK so that the familles get royalties for 100 years after his death The thing is as far as the public know he does not have any family himself.
What makes me laugh is that these people are multi millionaires and they still squeeze the public for every penny they can get.
The government are in process of making it possible to monitor our internet use and have said it your isp tracks you using torrent sites to download music etc then your broadband acess will be cut off. and you will be arrested police state or what
No. Copyright only protects copying. Selling an original is not make a copy and thus not a copyright issue.
There has been no serious effort on the part of the music industry to change this; just an occasional complaint or a baseless rumor. Even if you could get a law passed that would eliminate the first sale doctine – unlikely in the extreme* – it was be impossible to enforce on CDs anyway in a way that generates royalties.
The closest to this is the issue of stripped books. Sales of paperbacks without covers are illegal. These are books that were returned to the publisher for credit but which find their way into stores. “First sale” doesn’t apply – the books were never sold – and this is clearly fraudulent (the book returning the covers is required to state that the books have been destroyed).
*There are too many interest groups who like it as it is, and collectively, they have as much force as the recording industry, if not more.
I caught a bit of a Larry King show and Garth Brooks was the guest. He went into a 5 minute rant about people stealing from him and other artists when they sell used CD’s and don’t pay royalties. King tried to compare the sale of used CD’s to the sale of other used items such as cars that are also often sold used. Brooks said that it is different, consumers only buy the enjoyment of listening to the music, they are not buying ownership of the song. So remember that if you ever sell a used CD, you are selling enjoyment, not music.
Garth is welcome to his bizarre and completely incorrect interpretation of reality. Don’t the buyers of a used car buy the enjoyment and utility of driving?
Personally, I want copyright returned to the same time limits as patents. The vast majority of the value of a copyright is obtained, or not, in the first few years. The only excuse for copyright term extension is to build business empires built on the work of creative people and support useless leech descendants of creative people.
On a more serious note, I remember when the industry started putting those seals across the jewel case for CDs. It was supposed to be your guarantee of buying a new CD and supposed to discourage you from buying used.
They recently changed the laws here in Australia so that painters and sculptors receive Royalties from subsequent sales of their Art, provided it’s over a certain $ value ($1000? Something like that).
I don’t agree with the law, not because I don’t want to see artists compensated for their work, but because I believe it sets a precedent for musicians and movie producers (or, more realistically, the large companies representing them) to try and claim even more money for something they’ve already made a fortune off anyway.
Copyright needs to be shortened, IMHO, especially for entertainment software, but that’s a topic for a different thread, I think…
I have seen warning about the sale of stripped books, but in all of my travels I have never seen one for sale. If this truly a problem the publishers could fix it right now by requiring the return of the cover + the first 15 pages of the book to get credit.
That one makes sense. You’re a broke artist, you sell your work for peanuts. Then somehow you become well-known, and collectors are trading your pieces of obscene amounts. And you don’t get anything off that?
Similarly, I can see why music should be charged to each user, including second-hand users. But in that case, they’re already making too much money and not giving it to the right people.
I think the poor people who buy coverless books deserve to read them. Imagine how much shit publishers would be handing out over library system if the concept weren’t over a century old. All these people enjoying books for free! (And CDs too…)
The whole point of stripping covers is for bookstores to provide a cheap and easy way to show that they’ve taken the book out of stock. It costs very little to ship covers. Requiring any more than the cover to be returned defeats that.
Problems with stripped books dates from another era in any case. Back in the 1970s, some enterprising locals would buy up lots of stripped books and sell them in used book stores. It was a variation on the remainder system of hardback books, but existed in a gray market. It wasn’t strictly legal but on a small scale nobody bothered with them.
After a time, however, it became more widespread and whole shops sprang up to sell them. It’s the age-old story. If you put serviceable goods into the market at a fraction of the normal price, people will start expecting to pay that price all the time. But the goods can’t be produced for that low a price, and no vendor could stay in business selling them at that price. It only worked for stolen merchandise, where somebody else got stuck with the bill for the true cost. No different from selling hot microwaves off the back of a truck. Stolen merchandise has an advantage - until you crack down on the thieves.
Since it was technically illegal for the bookseller to be selling stripped books - they had a contract with the publisher that stripped books would be pulped - publishers could crack down on the the bookstores. So they did. And the problem went away.
Today, only a few publishers bother to print the stripped books reminder. It’s a non-issue. The only stripped books on the market come from a few employees stealing them. These can be dealt with individually. There’s no wholesale public market any more.
It’s like all those jokes about annoying door-to-door salesmen. They once were very common, but today hardly exist at all. But the meme continues to live way beyond its time.
Yes, Troubled by conflicts between career and family, in 2001 Brooks officially retired from recording and performing.[1] During this time he sold millions of albums through an exclusive distribution deal with Wal-Mart and has sporadically released new singles.
